I remember once at a Historicon (or was it Cold Wars - I can't remember which, there's been so many - they all run together after a while) browsing the dealer area, and picking up a set of rules that touted itself as being "the best researched set of rules in the hobby. I don't remember which rules set it was (there's been so many - they all run together after a while), but the authors seem to have not stinted on the graphics and printing. The come-on phrase intrigued me, and I immediately went to the bibliography in the back of the rules, desiring to see what the research was based upon. The Bibliography was not long, and consisted of many very broad works on warfare in general, several "overview" works of the period, and one or two very narrowly detailed specialized titles (with only a very tenuous connection to the period the rules dealt with). There was one more group, in fact the largest of all, which was other sets of wargame rules of the period. As I paged through he rules I realized that in the author's mind this, (reading other sets of rules) constituted the bulk of the research. I did not buy the set, as I generally don't fall for the claims of snake-oil-salesmen, hair restoring creams, or the blandishments of the blow-dried flim-flam men on the televangelist shows. Yet the objective of this article is not to be dismissive or supercilious, or to negatively review a specific set of rules. It is rather to deal with the question of how, in a hobby that stridently proclaims its dedication to "Historical Miniatures," does one do research to frame a set of rules. If the games are to be "historically accurate" how are we to then design the game to ensure that we are faithful to the objective? Historical research, real historical research, that is, the stuff that gets into books and journals, follows a fairly rigorous path. The method, whether you are making a monograph, a comparative history, or a general work is to first immerse yourself in the synthetic works of the period. By "synthetic works" I mean broad general histories, "overviews" of the period. They are termed "synthetic" because they "synthesize" or bring together all of the facets of history (social, intellectual, political, economic, etc.) Once this is done you then move on to the secondary sources in an attempt to narrow the focus and select an area of study. Here the work will deal with one of the issues "synthesized" by the synthetic histories. Thus if you were doing something on the Renaissance you would read, on the synthetic level, for example, Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy or J.R. Hale's The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance or perhaps even William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire. On the secondary level, assuming you were going to study military history, you would read Oman's The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, or F.L. Taylor's The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529. The objective of this is three fold, the first to gain a competent understanding of the wider world of the time, a thorough understanding of the particulars of the period, and finally to acquaint yourself with the scholarly debate and the issues and arguments of the various parties to the debate. If you were doing something on Renaissance Art, for example, some of the issues might be not only the skill of the painter, but the role of the client and patron, how much did he control the artists work? Did the artist or the patron determine the subject and the details of composition? Were the images portrayed those of the artist? Of the patron? Of the time? In military history it is the same thing. "What was the role of technology? How effective was it on the battlefield? Which battlefield? What was the social role of the knight? How did social and religious attitudes influence the conduct of war, or battle, of executing orders? Debate on any of the issues in the scholarly community can be long, convoluted and at times acrimonious and even vicious. Most of the positions taken by the authors is enunciated in the introduction, that part of the book that is not only most important, but most often skipped by the reader. Consider the following from page one of Taylor's The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529. "The change from medieval to modern methods in the art of war is closely related to the general transformation of European civilization which goes by the name of the Renaissance. The revival of interest in ancient history and literature had a distinct effect on military theory and practice. The new spirit of inquiry and experiment applied itself vigorously to military problems. Moreover the avowed national separatism which replaced the sham imperialism of the Middle Ages accentuated the rivalry between states and produced wars which were more frequent, more prolonged, and more general, and more intensive than those of the preceding centuries. The history of these wars waged in an age of eager intellectual activity, reveals, as we should expect it to reveal, rapid progress, amounting almost to a revolution, in the use of arms, but what makes an examination of the subject singularly instructive is the fact that the most important of these campaigns were fought in Italy during the culminating years of the Italian Renaissance. The finest minds of the day had the opportunity of witnessing, of recording, and of commenting on the exploits of the leading captains and most famous troops of Europe. They assisted in the interplay of ideas and comparison of experiences. The fruit of this period's intensive cultivation of the art of war was the military science of the modern world." [1] The above words bear reading several times to keep in mind the points that Taylor is making. Each point could be debated, and has been by such notables as Michael Howard, Geoffrey Parker, Michael Roberts, and John Keegan. I myself find much to disagree with. Let us however turn to Sir Charles Oman in his The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century for a contrary, yet contemporary (to Taylor) opinion. Oman does not at all see the campaigns in Italy as either the most important or the most instructive. In fact he sees it only as one among a constellation of interconnected wars, struggles, and political re-arrangements that signify a widening of the European horizon. "Everything is changed when we shift on from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, and all the old local groups of war gradually grew into one single complex in which Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire are all involved together.even England, cut off from sixty years from continental campaigns, joins in, intermittently, and rather ineffectively, while at the other end of Europe the Sultan's main contest with Christendom on the Danube and the Mediterranean is slightly affected by the Russian expansion down the Volga and the Don, which impinged upon the Tartar vassals of the Porte, and once brought a Turkish army so far east as Astrachan [sic], where it died of Russian frosts." [2] Once a writer has reached this stage, that is, you have familiarized yourself with the issues and debates you can then frame a question of your own, either to support with new evidence the opinion of an existing writer, refute his opinion (again with new evidence, offer a new opinion, or open up a new facet of the debate. It is in the quest of these that a writer then goes on to the final, and most important level of research, the investigation of the primary sources. Primary sources would be, for military historians, first hand accounts, memoirs, maps, statistical data, lists of casualties, orders of battle, battle orders (not the same thing), and even personal inspection of the site, archeological evidence, and, where applicable, interdisciplinary research. An example of interdisciplinary research is what is the effect of a galloping wounded horse collapsing directly in front of a lot of other galloping horses? For this films of steeplechases or equestrian events might be studied. Yet it might be objected that this is entirely out of place with a game, where the intent is not to write a monograph or a history, but to provide a set of guidelines for the conduct of a table top battle. It might also be objected that there are no "debates" to be engaged in wargames, that we all know what happened, and simply set out to model what "really happened." Yet I would argue that nothing is further from the truth. Rule sets are all about taking positions in a "debate" over what a "realistic" game may be, and if one is to judge by the letters to the editor in the wargame magazine arguments by mail over the merits or demerits of one game over the other are as heated and acrimonious as any in academia. You cannot make a set of rules without making judgments and predispositions as to the effectiveness of one arm over the other, one tactic over the other, or one method of technology over the other. I do not think I need to go into detail on this, we all know of dozens of rules that are what we would term "morale games" and opposing viewpoints that depend heavily on weapons statistics and performance. Years ago there was a great fad in Napoleonics of "National Modifiers." This seems to now have subsided. I am by no means an expert in wargame rules, owning very few sets, and playing somewhat less than that. Nevertheless I think I can hypothesize four general "schools" of theory of wargame rules which are more or less "in debate" with each other. The first is of course are the "Moral Imperitivists" which sees battle as primarily a contest of wills, that is, who can endure the hellish environment of a battle the longest, or who has the moral edge in any encounter. My own Soldiers and Warriors fall into this category. The "Technological Determinists" on the other hand would assert that morale factors are of minor importance, and indeed, are directly affected by the amount of danger that can be brought to bear on them, and this is in turn determined by the technological proficiency or superiority of one side over the other. I cannot name a specific set of these, though most modern wargame rules tend to be in this category. A third group would represented by the Wargame Research Group rules, and I would call them the "Structural Functionalists." That is, the organization and deployment of units is the primary mechanism of decision in the game, that the course of a meeting between opposing units is a function of the comparative and competing structure of the respective forces. In this individual morale and even unit morale is conditioned by the pre-battle soldiers life of drill, learned techniques etc. These three types have generally dominated the Wargaming Rules world since its inception. I will argue however that there are, or could be yet two more "schools" of thought on wargame rules. The first I will call the "Phenomenal Incidentalist." This group asserts that all of the above have attempted to derive too much from objective reality. War, they would insist is far too chaotic to be able to model successfully using rules structures and logical cause and effect. Thus war is essentially a series of random encounters, unplanned and unforseen phenomenon and decisions made on incomplete and always erroneous information. By this theory we should have far more random die rolls, and less of them, thus heightening the "chaotic" effect and at the same time modeling the real "risk" and "danger" of real war. I myself am tending this way, seeking to derive by a larger "net effect" the wide swings and far-ranging action of real war. Finally it is possible to produce a fifth school, which I will call the "Cultural Essentialists" which would say that war is more than anything else the conflict of cultural factors that underlie all the thoughts and actions of soldiers, units, and armies in war, and that technology and command are merely superstructure to this. This school would hold that the cultural background to war is all-important. Thus, for them, no matter what the weapons or tactics, the Spanish would always be victorious against the Aztecs simply because the culture of the Spaniards was more ruthlessly efficient on the battlefield. [3] I know of no set of rules adopted under this idea, but it certainly would be a new and innovative one. It is not the point of this to simply advance interesting sounding, perhaps obscuritanist vocabulary into games. Far from it, the hobby has enough of that already yet at the same time has been marvelously free of the jargon-ridden writing of other fields. It is the point of the article to urge upon gamers and designers to actively think about these questions for they are essential to writing good rules. By firmly knowing what the presuppositions you are making are (what school above you fall into), you can easily sort out what type of rules you want to write, what you will include and what you will exclude, and more importantly the type of data that you will have to consult when you do your primary research. It will aid in the writing of better, more compact, and easy to understand rules because you will not be adding in a lot of extraneous rules and steps to model factors and forces that you don't believe in anyway. Thus, for example, in a large-scale board gamer of the Civil War, or even a miniatures game, where one counter or table top gun represents one or more batteries, it is absurd to get into detail as to whether the guns were Parrots, Ordinance Rifles, Dahlgren's, Wizards, etc, especially if you are developing a set of rules in the Moral Imperativist school. This brings us at last to the final step, the sources. Obviously you will still have to read synthetic works if you know nothing about the period. If you are already knowledgeable, you can probably dispense with this. You almost certainly will have to go back and read the secondary literature. Primary literature however is more questionable. Certainly memoirs, accounts, diaries and the like are important, but they must be read with caution, and with an eye to when they were written how long after the event, by whom, and for whom. If for example, an account of a battle say, Waterloo, was published as a personal reminiscences twenty or thirty years after the event, it is quite possible that the intervening time has both removed some "memories" from the participant, and added others. Likewise, the further we are from an event the more we have had time to think about it, rationalize it, and flatten out the kinks and bends so that it makes a nice, neat, seamless, and perfectly self-serving story. The venue in which it was published is also important. If for example it was written as a letter to a friend or family member, that is one thing. If on the other hand it was written to a superior as an after action report one must be alert to the possibility that once again the writer may be putting the best face on the events. On the other hand if it was published first as a serial article in a popular tabloid of the time it is likely to be full of wonderful tales of "stout British lads" bravely charging or standing for king and country and all that claptrap - in short it may be as realistic as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Nor is numerical quantifiable date less suspect. Under what circumstances was the data obtained? Who provided the data? Who was it provided for, and what was the context in which it was provided. Thus we might assume that firing range tests of the effectiveness (and what pray tell does that mean) of a specific rifle might lead us to accurate conclusions about the lethality of the weapon. On the other hand, if these firing range tests were provided by the maker of the weapon to be delivered to the agency that was to purchase the weapon in bulk, we might be a little more suspect. If the tests were done at the request of a purchasing agency to a manufacturing firm acting as a result of complaints from field commanders we obviously should be highly suspect. An excellent example of this might be the data on German torpedoes in World War II. Pre-war data indicated the torpedoes were excellent, yet the shocking rate of duds, poor depth keepers, premature exploders, and erratic direction keepers belies the fact. Even after these defects were known the civilian manufactures kept insisting it was crew ineptitude, not design problems that were at fault. They were corrected late in the war, but by then it was too late. Let me give another example of the wrongful application of data. Once might go to the other extreme in the case of rifle effectiveness and conclude that by dividing the number of rounds produced by the number of enemy casualties to rifle fire one could get a general lethality rate. Many have done this and discovered that it has taken (in the American Civil War for example) over a thousand cartridges to kill or wound one man. As an exercise in military logistics and top end procurement it is an invaluable and probably highly accurate figure, but as one which indicates the lethality of a particular weapon it is meaningless. Included in it must not only be the cartridges fired at an enemy in anger, but those lost, ruined by weather, bought and left to rot in magazines, used in target practice and training, and those billed for, but not provided by the crooked contractors. If this is the case with data derived from numeric observation, what of the case of subjective analysis and assumptions based upon non-quantifiable data? Researching Wargame rules then can be, for the serious gamer no light matter of whimsically pulling a sheet of paper to you, grabbing a pencil and scribbling down - "Infantry shall move three inches and cavalry 6." NOTES [1] F. L. Taylor, The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529 (Essex England: Partizan Press., 1993) Originally printed cambridge Press., 1921.1-2. [2] Oman, Sir Charles The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Greenhill Books, 1991) First printing 1937, 5. [3] See Inga Clendennin Aztecs and Robert Thomas' Conquest. Back to Table of Contents -- Courier #75 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com